Grouping Recorded Music by Structural Similarity

This paper introduces a method for the organization of recorded music according to structural similarity. It uses the Normalized Compression Distance (NCD) to measure the pairwise similarity between songs, represented using beat-synchronous self-similarity matrices. The approach is evaluated on its ability to cluster a collection into groups of performances of the same musical work. Tests are aimed at finding the combination of system parameters that improve clustering, and at highlighting the benefits and shortcomings of the proposed method. Results show that structural similarities can be well characterized by this approach, given consistency in beat tracking and overall song structure.